Handbrewing coffee

2019-03-06

Shawn Blanc wrote about how he switched to a Moccamaster for brewing
his morning coffee. It’s a nice post about productivity, but it made me want to
talk about coffee.

We hand-brew all1 the coffee we drink at the office with a drip cone. We
have been doing this for a couple of years already. I like it, but out of
courtesy towards my colleagues I’ve floated the idea of buying an electric
coffee maker a couple of times. So far they have preferred to continue with
hand-brewing. But why bother?

It’s not because of the taste. I don’t think that I could tell apart my hand-brew
and well-made batch brew in a blind test.

I like the ritual, and the exercise in patience. First you weigh2 and grind the
beans while waiting for the way-too-slow kettle to boil the water. Then you pour and wait and
pour and wait. Then you wash the cone and finally you get to taste the coffee.

The drip cone maintenance is easy, too. Washing the cone after each use
takes only a couple of seconds. The fundamentals of good coffee are
freshly-ground beans and clean equipment. Taking care of the latter couldn’t be
easier. And hand-brewing makes it easier to not drink too much coffee, because
the coffee is not there just waiting for you to overdose.

On the other hand, using an electric coffee maker would free me from pouring the
water. I brew coffee maybe once per day, so that would same me about 3.5 minutes
a day. There are about 200 working days in a year, so that amounts to almost 12
hours. It takes something like six hours to read a medium-size novel. In a year
I could read two more books during my breaks instead of staring at coffee. The choices!

We do have an espresso machine, but we use it maybe once a month. Also we buy beans that work great for filter coffee and turns out that not all of them are great for espresso.
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